That Time I Realized I Was Asian
“Never wait by the phone for someone to call and cast you. Go out and make your own work and they’ll line up to see you.”
That was an eternal mantra from my professors in acting school. It was the early 2000’s. Small, quirky, multi-cultural theater was all the rage in New York City, and producing your own shows truly was the best way to get noticed by a casting director, agent, or showrunner looking for the next ‘hot young thing’ to debut during pilot season.
So I did what my acting professors told me to do and founded a theater company, Thirsty Turtle Productions, on the eve of my graduation. We were a labor of love, a small ensemble of 13 people from diverse backgrounds, glued together with youthful energy, duct tape, and spit, and I loved every minute of it.
As time passed, I realized that my treasured mantra only went so far. We could get folks to our shows, and they would enjoy them, even praise them. And one by one, I saw my former classmates audition for amazing roles, and even land a few big ones.
Me? Well, the year I founded Thirsty Turtle — 2004 — I saw six roles for Asian men in all of New York film and television.
Six.
And only two of those had more than five lines in the entire script.
There was no Master of None, no Fresh Off the Boat, no Lost or Heroes. Heck, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle hadn’t even come out.
My prospects were looking bleak. The industry did not want people like me.
It was a big wake-up call. I grew up in San Jose, in a majority Asian-American community, and I was used to getting cast in the bigger roles in high school productions. I was used to the fact that most of the cast, crew, and audience looked like me. I was used to the privilege of being in the majority, and not having to go out of my way to prove that I could play a heartthrob, schlub, or bad boy.
When I got to NYU, my professors repeated the mantra about seizing your own destiny, and it made me feel invincible, like my fate was in my own hands. It didn’t matter what color, size, or shape I was; if I had a stellar work ethic and wasn’t a jerk, I’d outlast all of my lazier, more-jerky peers.
What happened instead was I went out into the world, looked around, and got discouraged by the lack of opportunity. By the lack of people who looked like me. And so I left acting behind. A dream deferred.
It tore me apart. That feeling that my talent and hard work didn’t matter so long as the industry didn’t see a need for me.
Fast-forward seven years, through a ton of changes in my life, and here I am, head of talent in SYPartners’ San Francisco office. I love my job, am married to a nice Southern boy, and extremely happy to be back in the Bay Area. But I can’t stop thinking about this idea of being wanted (or rather, the feeling of being unwanted) by an industry.
The Bay Area is a funny place. Design and technology are the driving industries, but diversity in the workforce is still a challenge. Graphic design is 86% white. Tech is two-thirds male and 88% white and Asian. Even LGBT progress in the design industry (traditionally a bastion of support) is limited primarily to white men. And you must search hard to find a disabled person, a military veteran, or an individual who came from poverty.
But I’m starting see promising signs of change — companies all around the Bay Area have put diversity and inclusion top of mind. Marc Benioff recently announced Salesforce’s first Chief Equality Officer. There’s increased transparency around the tech world’s employee demographics. Sharing economy companies are moving to make whole industries more inclusive. And Silicon Valley’s design luminaries are bemoaning the direness of the problem.
At SYPartners, our senior leadership team is made up of roughly equal numbers of men and women, with strong representation from the LGBT community. That is so inspiring to me. But I look around, and still see a long road ahead before we become as diverse as the communities we look to serve.
But for once, I find myself in a position to be part of changing the system. To actively recruit underrepresented people to join our family, and to make ours the most inclusive environment possible. To help me make sense of such a large, hairy, intractable problem, (the kind SYPartners loves to tackle), I’ve been asking myself three questions every week:
- How can I help make my workplace not just more diverse, but also more inclusive?
- Am I combating my own implicit biases in my interviews? Am I helping others understand what their biases are so they can begin to acknowledge them in their own interviews?
- Based on my own experience with the systemic racism in the entertainment industry, how might I help underrepresented groups succeed in our firm and our industry?
Thinking back to my previous life, I spent years looking for someone to tell stories I could be a part of. Now, it’s my turn to help others tell their own story. And to make more inclusive space, more blank canvas, and more supportive venues for those stories to be told at SYPartners.
Are you that person?
Dennis Tseng is Talent Manager for the San Francisco office of SYPartners. He likens the job to forming the Avengers twelve or thirteen times a year. Some small part of him is still holding out for that Aaron Sorkin script to land in his lap with the role of a lifetime.
